Deep in San Francisco, California’s Sunset district there is a house with a bowl in the backyard and a woodshop in the garage. This is where maker George Rocha creates new old skateboards out of old skateboards. The business is called Iris Skateboards, but from the sounds of it Rocha makes a lot of cool stuff. And his friends are obviously pretty good at building websites, shooting photos, and making slick films featuring Iris Skateboards. Which all works out pretty well for a guy who claims he doesn’t know anything about marketing. Check it out in Jeremy McNamara’s film Day by Day.
Like snowboard bindings that rotate, motorized skateboards have forever been a solution to a problem that does not exist. That hasn’t stopped a slew of Northern California tech heads from trying to design the perfect electric skateboard. (You may remember Boosted Boards whose batteries “vented”). Fast Company checks in with Ryan Evans “the 32-year-old CEO of an electric skateboard company called Inboard Technology” the latest producer of unaffordable longboards few skateboarders want to buy.
With the M1, Inboard hopes to snare early adopters who the company identifies as mostly men between 30 and 55 years of age who live in urban areas and earn more than $130,000 annually. According to Inboard’s analysis, a million people fit that description, and with more than twice the median income in the U.S., they can afford the $1,399 price tag. As the price drops, the potential customer base grows. If the board costs less than $1,000, college kids are more likely to buy it, and at a price point under $600, high schoolers get in on it.
Want to roll on a skateboard without pushing? Go down a hill. Want to get to work without driving a car (or pushing a skateboard), ride a bike. Want to look like a total tool while riding a skateboard in a suit, talking on a cellphone, and swerving through pedestrians? Looks like the Inboard M1 is just for you.
Patagonia has sponsored a new film The More Things Change by Nathan Myers and Gerry Lopez, featuring Dave Rastovich, Rob Machado and Rizal Tanjung.
When Gerry Lopez first surfed Uluwatu in 1974, the fabled Balinese wave was magical, empty and pristine. Gerry returned to Uluwatu 40 years later to find it bustling, developed and profoundly changed. After a week of surfing and yoga, however, Gerry tapped into a spirit of place that continues to endure. . . In recent years, booming popularity has placed huge environmental pressure on the Uluwatu area. Project Clean Uluwatu is working to ease this pressure and restore the area’s pristine nature.
To watch the entire film, please click play. For more info and/or to make a donation to Project Clean Uluwatu, please click the link below.
Remember this Lily video? It was a drone that magically followed you wherever you went and shot epic follow cam footage without anyone at the controls. Yeah, we do, too. And when we first saw it we thought it was a bit of a dream product — great in the promo video, but never something that would actually work. In fact, we never even posted anything about it.
Apparently, many others believed the hype and threw down big money on pre-orders. Unfortunately, things didn’t go well during production of the drone and the company has now closed up shop and is trying to return money to those who pre-ordered. Meanwhile, the San Francisco District Attorney’s office has filed a civil consumer protection suit “alleging the company had intentionally lied to potential customers with its launch video” according to as story in Forbes.
An interesting side note is that legendary snowboard filmer Brad Kremer has been sucked into the story as he was the recipient of emails that are being used as evidence in the case against Lily.
In an email cited by the lawsuit, Lily CEO Balaresque wrote to Brad Kremer, a video producer who specialized in snowboarding shoots, that shots from the Lily Drone will be using a “Gopro mounted to a Lily prototype. . . . However, we do not feel comfortable telling people that we shot [view from Lily] scenes with a Gopro (because the whole thesis of our product is that you do not need a Gopro),” he continued. “Can you modify a Gopro image in post-processing so that people cannot tell that it was taken from a Gopro…”
According to the story, Kremer declined to discuss the case with Forbes.
It’s always great watching Temple Cummins slide the white, but the real joy in this clip is Austen Sweetin’s hauntingly raw and sloppy version of Highwaymen. It sounds good.
Philosophical powboarding in the freshest from Wolle Nyvelt and friends. “Surfing changed my approach and how I look at snowboarding a lot.” What is the meaning of all these levels of paradise? Of a cameo from Hydrodynamica surfboard shaper Richard Kenvin. We don’t know. It goes way, way too deeply into the glide.
Best surfing Christmas song ever. Hit play and let The Rad Dudes put you in the mood. For the story behind Joe Klein’s late 80s Christmas anthem click here.
